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If you are at all squeamish, I recommend you read This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor lying flat on your back. More than once on my commute, as I raced through Adam Kay's hilarious, heart-breaking book, I felt the legs begin to wobble. Deep breath. Find a seat. Think of something cuddly.

This is Going to Hurt, a Sunday Times bestseller and the winner of the Books Are My Bag 2017 Readers' Choice Award, consists of Kay's edited diaries, covering the six years between 2004 and 2010 that he spent as a junior doctor in the NHS. Blood, guts and everything else besides were an unavoidable part of the day (and frequently night) job.

But even those with a strong constitution might have their stomachs turned by some of Kay's stories, such as the time an 18-year-old slid down a gritty lamp post on his birthday and "de-gloved" – shaved all the skin off – his penis. This act of exuberance, Kay writes, left the poor fellow with nothing but "a couple of inches of urethra, coated with a thin layer of bloody pulp, maybe a centimetre diameter in total. It brought to mind a remnant of spaghetti stuck to the bottom of the bowl by a smear of tomato sauce."

Though softly spoken, Kay is every bit as amusing in person as he is on the page. The moment we meet in a west London office, he is telling me about his awful experience that morning with the parking meter and laughing about the poor lawyers whose job it was to ensure patient confidentiality was adhered to throughout the book.

"[In an early draft], I wrote about quite a few of the times when celebrities had come into the hospital," the 37-year-old says, taking a sip of tea. "There are some amazing stories but the lawyer was like, 'what are you doing?!' So those went." He lets out a great laugh. "It's a great shame but it would have been a significant dereliction of duty and we'd be doing this interview with a hand-set, through one of those glass walls in prison."

Double-handed: Adam Kay at the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards last week, where he picked up two awardsCredit:
Adam Bronkhorst

It wasn't just the celebrity stories that had to go, though. Kay says there were "20 to 30 incidents that weren't included because my publisher thought they were 'tonally adrift'." Against my better judgement, I ask Kay if he'll tell me about one of these "incidents", hoping there will be some legal reason why he can't. But no, he's already off. I reach for a cup of sweet tea.

"So there was a guy in his early 20s," says Kay, "who decided that he was going to surprise his girlfriend on her birthday by getting naked, lying on the kitchen table, covering himself head-to-toe in chocolate body paint, getting an erection and then sticking a candle in his... you know.

"When he heard the key in the door, he lay down and lit the candle. But by the time she had got into the kitchen, the hot wax was dripping down into his bladder. And by the time we got him to hospital, it was all fused together, so that was hours and hours in theatre unpicking the mess."

Not all of the diary entries are quite so "revolting" (his word, not mine, though it's hard to disagree). Many are uplifting, such as the time Kay saves his first life ("Sorry, Death – you're one short for your dinner party this evening"). Others highlight the absurdity of working for the NHS ("In gynae clinic, I go online to look up some management guidelines for a patient. The trust's IT department has blocked the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology website and classified it as 'pornography'.").

Scrubbing up: Adam Kay reads a copy of his book This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor

And some are simply so funny, they make you howl ("I tell her she can have sex again as soon a she feels ready, but to use alternative contraception until her next period. I nod at her husband and say, 'That means he has to wear a condom.' I can't quite work out why their faces are a picture of horror [...] I look at them both again, and realise the man is actually her father.").

It is not surprising that the book is so amusing. Kay, who attended Dulwich College and whose father was also a doctor, performed comedy with musical group Amateur Transplants throughout his time studying at the Imperial College School of Medicine. Amateur Transplants are the ones responsible for The London Underground Song, that immensely popular parody of The Jam's Going Underground, which features the lyrics, "Where the f--k's my f--king train? London Underground/ They're all lazy, f--king, useless c--ts, London Underground."

And since Kay, who now lives in Chiswick with his boyfriend, the television producer James Farrell, quit being a doctor in 2010 (more of which later), he has toured a series of stand-up shows and has writing credits on television programmes, including Mitchell and Webb, Mrs Brown's Boys and the new Jack Whitehall series Bounty Hunters.

But for all the laughs in This is Going to Hurt, the book is also a devastating account of our National Health Service. It is a tale of brutal hours, poor pay, and a crippling shortage of staff (chaos basically), all brought about, Kay argues, by a lack of government funding. "It's just a fact that the money has, you know, disappeared," he says.

Kay decided to dig out his old diaries and write This is Going to Hurt after the 2016 junior doctors' strike over the proposed introduction of a seven-day NHS service. Kay felt that junior doctors were being unfairly maligned by the government and the press.

Key note: Adam Kay performing his stand-up musical comedy

"During the strike, there was this suggestion that [junior] doctors were motivated by money," says Kay. "But you'd have to be demented to go into medicine because you had dollar signs behind your eyes." At one stage in the book, Kay highlights that the £3 an hour parking meter outside the hospital was earning more than he was.

However bad things were for Kay, though, he believes today's junior doctors have it much, much worse. "There has always been a lot that is s--t about this job," he says. "But one thing we've never had before is [junior doctors] being beaten up by the government. You'd always moan and say this bloody health secretary is the worst one since the last health secretary. You'd never like them but I don't think it's ever been the case before that war has been waged. It's just so disheartening."

Would a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour government make a difference? Kay is circumspect. "They have said they would spend more on the NHS," he says. "But this is not a political book. We just need whoever is in government, and it could be a Tory, to be desperate for the NHS to thrive."

And where does he think the NHS will be in 10 years time? "We are at this Sliding Doors moment," says Kay. "Either the NHS will be where it was 10 years ago or it will be completely gone. There could be a barren wasteland where the NHS once was and in its place, there will be some sort of Medicare or insurance-based system. It would be like a rich/poor apartheid of care." Kay pauses. "It's almost unthinkable to imagine that as a situation."

Kay did not quit for political or financial reasons, though. Having specialised in obstetrics and gynaecology (or "Brats and Twats", as he refers to it), Kay was, by 2010, an experienced and well respected doctor. On December 2 2010, he was the most senior doctor on the labour ward.

Following a complication during a caesarean that day, however, a baby died and its mother lost 12 litres of blood and was whisked off to intensive care. The diary entry reads: "I start to write up my operation notes but instead just cry for an hour." It was not Kay's fault ("All my peers would have done exactly the same thing and had exactly the same outcome") but he never fully came to terms with the events of that day.

"I went six months without laughing," Kay writes in the final section of the book. "Every smile was just an impression of one – I felt bereaved. I should have had counselling – in fact, my hospital should have arranged it. But there's a mutual code of silence that keeps help from those who need it most."

Kay didn't talk to anyone, not even his parents, about the trauma and his feelings of guilt. A few months later, he walked away from medicine for good. For many of his friends and family, this book is the first time they will have understood Kay's reasons for quitting.

"If I'd been told at the time, 'take a few weeks off', I'd have probably stayed in," he says. "But I suspect that further down the line, something else would have happened and I wouldn't have been able to deal with that.

"[In obstetrics and gynaecology], it's the fact that the people who come in are meant to leave with a healthy baby and the patients are generally in their 20s or 30s. They arrive completely fit and well, with a husband and a new buggy, expecting to take the baby home. And when things go wrong, that's the bit I couldn't deal with."

Kay's message is clear: the men and women in white coats are humans, too, and as a society, we need to treat them as such. "Human beings make mistakes and get sick and get sad and get angry," says Kay. "It's good if this book helps people understand what the job is. Just remember that a doctor is someone with a flat and a partner and a life."

Oh, and one other thing: for God's sake, stay away from lamp posts. As the interview draws to a close, I can't help but wonder what will have become of that "de-gloved" chap? For a moment, Kay is back in doctor mode. "He'd have had some sort of reconstruction," he says. "It wouldn't work for sex but you could pee out of it." Then he stops, remembers that he's a comedian these days, and adds with a chuckle: "It would be a bit like a wine box with one of those spigot taps."

Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor was the Readers’ Choice winner at the 2017 Books Are My Bag Readers Awards